Homesteaders+1862

=Homesteaders 1862= Janice Wilhelm jwilhelm1120@yahoo.com

Instructional Objective
(http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/hssstandards.doc) 5.8 Students trace the colonization, immigration, and **settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s,** with emphasis on the role of economic incentives, effects of the physical and political geography, and transportation systems.
 * History-Social Science Framework for California Public Schools**

8.8 Students analyze the divergent paths of the American people in the West from 1800 to the mid-1800s and the challenges they faced. 2. Describe the purpose, challenges, and economic incentives associated with westward expansion, including the concept of Manifest Destiny (e.g., the Lewis and Clark expedition, accounts of the removal of Indians, the Cherokees’ “Trail of Tears,” **settlement of the Great Plains)** and the territorial acquisitions that spanned numerous decades.

Learners & Context of Use
The game is designed for children from 5th grade level and above. It could be used in conjunction with social studies classes about expansion west in the US from fifth through eighth grades. The goal is to enliven past history for the learner by letting them experience some of the risks and chances experienced by pioneers settling in the West in the eighteenth century.

After doing readings and discussion about settlement in the West and the Homestead Act of 1862, the game could be played to reinforce the concepts and to give learners a feel for the risks and rewards of being a pioneer. It could be played more than once.

Competing Products
There are several games that cover similar content (see below). "Stake a homestead" is most similar to this game, however, there are some differences in the current game that emphasizes the real-life risks involved for pioneers in the mid-eighteenth century.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/31260 "In Agricola, you're a farmer in a wooden shack with your spouse and little else. On a turn, you get to take only two actions, one for you and one for the spouse, from all the possibilities you'll find on a farm: collecting clay, wood, or stone; building fences; and so on. You might think about having kids in order to get more work accomplished, but first you need to expand your house. And what are you going to feed all the little rugrats?"
 * Agricola**

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/28154 "In 1862 congress passed the Homestead Act. A United States citizen twenty-one years old could file a claim on 160 acres of public land which he wished to own as a home for himself and his family. If he lived there for five years, had built a house and was raising crop, he was given title to the land. Players take turns drawing cards and playing them onto their Land Tracts. The cards come in 5 colors, one for each year. At the end of the game, players who have a house, crop, and 4 of the 6 other types of cards, without having the claim jumper card, win."
 * Stake a homestead (1964)**

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/26566 "Homesteaders is an Auction and Resource Management game in which players bid on the opportunity to build certain types of buildings, then spend resource cubes to build one of several buildings of that type. The buildings confer abilities, income, and points; some automatically and some requiring a Worker. The game lasts 10 rounds, with each round consisting of an Auction phase followed by a Building phase. After the last round, players get 1 final income phase and one last chance to buy and sell goods and use their building abilities before scores are tallied. Players score for their buildings, bonuses conferred by buildings, and points earned throughout the game from selling resource cubes. The player who builds the best combination of buildings and best manages the 9 different resources in the game will score the most points and win, as long as they don't take on too much debt!"
 * Homesteaders (2006)**

Simulating pioneers in the nineteenth century, players strive to gain ownership of a 160-acre piece of farm land in the western United States. Each player has “five years” (five times around the board) to find a piece of land, to build a cabin on it, and to improve the land during that time so that ultimately the player gains a title to the land. The rules are consistent with the Homestead Act of 1862.
 * Object of the Game**

Content Analysis
Homesteaders Content Analysis

Game Materials

 * A board (print out 4 files and tape together)
 * [|hb2.jpg]
 * [|hb2b.gif]
 * [|hb2a.gif]
 * [|hb2d.gif]
 * [|hb2c.gif]
 * Pawns/cards to represent the player/homesteader (included in itemcards1 file)
 * A stack of chance cards to represent different chance events
 * [|chances.pdf]
 * Cards/pieces to represent items such as crops, orchards, wells, cabins, money, oxen, plows, etc.
 * [|itemcards1.pdf]
 * A set of two standard 6-sided dice

Time Required
The game should take about 15 minutes to set up, once all the pieces and cards are cut and assembled. Play should take about an hour, and players can play again if they so choose.

The Rules

 * 1) The simplified version of the game is for 2-4 players.
 * 2) At the beginning of the game, each player stakes a claim to a 160-acre piece of land. This claim is represented by a homestead tile. Players keep this tile before them as they play and place the item cards on it as they are received. The goal is for players to improve their land over a five-year period by living in a cabin, planting crops, and making other improvements such as drilling a well or planting an orchard.
 * 3) Setup: Event cards and Chance Cards are shuffled and placed on their respective stacks face down on the playing board. Item and money cards are retained in the “bank” by the banker. One player is designated as the “banker,” who distributes item cards (crops, homestead cabins, etc.) based on game activities.
 * 4) The die are cast by each player to determine who goes first (highest number). Play continues in a counter-clockwise fashion starting with player who goes first, and each in turn rolls the die to determine how many spaces are moved.
 * 5) Each time the player passes the Home space, he receives a one-year counter and $10 from the banker.
 * 6) Play continues until a player manages to finally win a title to his/her land. This is accomplished by accumulating 5 one-year counters (that is, passing Home 5 times), and at that point the player must also have a cabin and required “improvement” items on the homestead. If the player doesn’t have these items, play continues until one of the players achieves these goals.
 * 7) Required improvements include at least one crop or orchard in addition to a cabin, and at least another item such as an orchard, an ox, or a well. Players can have only one cabin on their homestead at any one time, but can have multiples of other items, such as orchards, wells or oxen. These items can also be traded or sold at the trading post, if a player lands on that spot.
 * 8) Player can land on a chance or event space, or a blank space. [In the second prototype I removed the information cards since they slowed down the flow of the game and didn't seem to accomplish the goal of adding a realistic atmosphere. In addition I added other risk spots that I thought would add more interest to the game.]
 * 9) There are two special spaces: Home and the Train ride . Home is the start and end point. Each time home is passed, the player is given $10 and a year token. If a player lands on the train ride (the Transcontinental Railroad was functioning after 1869 along many settlement areas), he/she can take a short cut to the Home space, where the player will collect $10 and the year token.
 * 10) In the second prototype I also added a trading post spot where players can buy, sell or trade items. I added "prices" to various item cards to give values that can then be sold at the trading post.
 * 11) Chance spaces: The player selects a card from the top of the event stack. Events can include good chances and possibly some setbacks, such as: “You sink a well on your land and find water!” (Player gets a well item card) or “A plague of locusts eliminates your crop of wheat. Forfeit one crop.” (Player forfeits a crop card, if he has one). Events lead to either increasing or decreasing the player’s stock of items or “improvements.” After the event, the event card is placed upside down on the bottom of the deck.
 * 12) If a player is asked to forfeit an item via a chance card, he must give up the item to the bank. If he doesn’t have the item, he forfeits nothing.
 * 13) After circling the board at least once and getting at least one year counter, if a player accumulates $200 he/she can purchase 5 one-year counters and end the game early (as long as he also holds the required cabin and improvements on his land). The Homestead Act allowed people to pay $1.25 per acre for 160 acres in order to get to get a deed to their land earlier (only six months instead of five years).

Motivational Issues
The game is intended to engage the learner by promoting some risk, chance and rewards as well as a bit of competition among players. Hopefully players can get a sense of the difficulties involved in settling land in the 19th century, as well as the possible rewards, risk and luck involved. Using Keller's ARCS model as a base, the game gets **attention** by giving each player a role as settler, and gets them involved by giving various opportunities to succeed as they progress around the board and have adventures. There is also an opportunity for strategizing, since there are various spots where players can make choices to go different routes. The game's intent is to be **relevant** in the context of a history class and give the learner an opportunity to experience a sense of the risks and rewards actually involved for pioneers settling the West. Players will gain **confidence** as they gain items and progress in the game. Options to trade and barter provide additional incentives. Hopefully there will be a sense of **satisfaction** gained by winning the game or at least gaining the cabin and items, and hopefully players will find it entertaining.

Design Process
In putting this game together my first thoughts were that it should be a fun game where there are some risks and rewards involved because that was true for the pioneers who settled the West during the Homestead era. I read some of the personal accounts of individuals from oral histories and interviews that were very dramatic about what the settlers had endured with blizzards, plagues, prairie fires, terrible losses, and yet some major, hard-won gains. I originally thought that it would be a good idea to put these original accounts onto information cards that would be read aloud during the course of the game (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html).

The first prototype was very simple. The player testing was really useful in identifying a major flaw in the prototype in that the board and pieces didn't really mirror the content. In this second prototype I tried to incorporate more content by dividing the board into four seasons. In traversing around the board you simulate a year cycle. You also encounter some risks due to seasons (blizzards, etc.).

The player testing also revealed that my idea about the information cards didn't work well and actually was a drag on the flow of the game. For fifth graders (and others) it would really slow down the game. So I decided to remove the information cards and instead tried to incorporate more "homestead elements" into the board and game elements themselves.

This experience has shown me how important it is to player test, instead of making assumptions just based on what you think might be a good idea. This final version is still just a crude prototype, and it would need a lot more testing and refinement to make it more playable and fun.